When Buses and Subways Make Transit Worse

transit systems are networks and we talk a lot on this channel about how to make them function better from how things are served or not served how far apart stop should be frequency padding clock based scheduling but when for the first time in a long time last year I found myself living on the edge of downtown Toronto I noticed a problem and one that should be stricken from our Transit networks because it like so many problems with transit systems is the effect of planning that doesn't actually consider how people will use the transit I call it the problem of two lines and it's a pernicious wasteful Transit anti- pattern that I think we need to work hard to remove from our cities and I'm going to tell you all about [Music] it welcome to RM Transit where I complain about parts of Transit networks that need a redesign so what is the problem of two lines let me break it down for you far too often in urban areas a public Transit Agency will run an infrequent bus in close proximity to a frequent Rapid Transit line if you have any examples of this in your city leave them down in the comments this is a weird situation because the bus is almost never a faster option for Riders and thus it gets little use since it's in this weird sort of Transit Purgatory where people demand that the agency runs the route so that they have a bus out front and yet not that many people use the route because it's not very useful wasting resources let me paint you a more specific example I used to live near Dupont and Christie in Toronto which isn't downtown but it's still pretty Central it's just a couple kilometer walk from the lakefront and a short distance from St George at the edge of the subway U that I think most people think of as defining downtown now say I wanted to go to St George station or really any location East Southeast or south of that point which would require me going through St George station how do I actually get there do I take the direct bus just out front on Dupont well I found myself basically never doing this walking to the Subway takes 10 to 12 minutes and optimistically the bus comes every 30 so at least half the time I'll get to the subway before I would get on the bus and of course once I get on the subway I'm going to be going much faster what's even crazier though is that I found myself often walking to DuPont station this is right on the route of the bus but what I found was that since it's only a 15-minute walk you're usually better off walking than catching the bus because even if the bus comes after 12 or maybe even 10 minutes you may still well beat it to your final destination because in Toronto at least buses often get stuck in traffic you see low frequency service really suffers for short trips in dense urban areas which is why Rapid Transit operating at high speeds with high frequency is so important for a lot of these short trips you can walk or cycle assuming that's possible where you live and of course it's often true in central parts of cities which means you're usually going to be better off not taking the bus or the tram there's even more reason for people not to want to to wait and that's because people don't like waiting they perceive time spent waiting as taking longer than time spent in motion so even just getting walking has a huge benefit but this of course is only half the equation the problem is Amplified by the presence of Rapid Transit because even for longer trips it will often be faster to walk which is rather slow to a faster mode as opposed to waiting for a slower one moreover if you walk straight to Rapid Transit you might get to avoid a transfer which most people find annoying obviously some people need the button but for people with a choice waiting for a bus like this is almost never going to be the best option it's the closest you can really get in Toronto to the experience of being in a small town where Transit service is infrequent and unreliable or a large US city but this is crazy because it's so close to the downtown core where You' expect transit to be really good and of course the problem is very broad it's not limited to Toronto and arguably Montreal has this problem even worse and that's because the city has a ton of very infrequent bus lines closely paralleling the metro to be honest it's insane for example look at the Orange Line just to the west of it you have the 55 bus on S Lon which runs like half hourly after 7:00 p.m. and is only 600 M away from the metro to the east you have the 14 bus which runs right by Park leant T great park by the way and it runs only about every 50 minutes that's all despite it being just 400 m away from the Metro there are exceptionally few trips where taking the 14 bus would be faster than taking the metro and then walking and that's a huge problem now beyond the fact that no Transit Agency should ever run a bus on a 50-minute Headway Montreal is even less able to get away with this abysmal level of frequency because people have a real option cycling though I can't entirely rule out the possibility that the reason Montreal cycling is good is because people got sick of waiting for the buses at least in Toronto when you leave the Central City and this is admittedly very weird service frequency gets way better so then with the problem identified how do we go about fixing it what's funny is that the problem here in these Urban centers is very similar to the problem you see across North America with Suburban bus networks where you have a ton of lowf frequency Meandering routes and not a strong frequent grid that people can interchange on in this case there actually is a grid of Transit lines but it's far too coarse meaning far too few of the routes actually operate frequently and are therefore useful too many streets have buses not enough streets have frequent buses the answer consolidation in the Montreal case if we look just a little further to the West we can see that the Park Avenue bus is also kind of crappy it only runs about every 20 minutes for a lot of the day but to be fair Park Avenue is 1 km away from the Metro so it actually does justify a decent bus service if we were to reallocate the bus service from the two infrequent routes closest to the metro to the park bus it could actually operate pretty frequently every 10 minutes or so you'd have fewer bus routes but more good ones doing this would probably actually increase bus ridership because even though you're reducing the number of routes and the coverage of the buses you're actually providing better service right now your best bet is often to just skip the buses alt together of course we generally shouldn't lean in the direction of Simply cutting bus routes but enhance their frequency so that their existence makes sense and so that they're not wasting resources that could be better used on other routs to improve frequency my guess as to why this is a problem that reoccurs in multiple cities is that downtown people are more willing to demand a bus and the Transit Agency is more willing to oblig but this leads to a crazy situation where you have a bunch of vehicles on Parallel routes that are not far apart running very infrequently meaning that if you want to travel say east west or north south it's very impractical because you have to determine which one of these north south routes is going to come first and then try to catch the bus on it which in practice when there's a rapid transit line means most people are probably just going to walk to the rapid transit line because they know a vehicle will come quickly ultimately it's kind of like Transit heat death Transit is just Spread Way Too Thin now fixing Transit heat death could rely on a few different ideas one of them is that you shouldn't operate any bus route that has a frequency of less than say every 15 minutes because doing that is really wasteful if you really think a bus route shouldn't be cut you need to increase its surface and a local transit route like a bus that's proximal to a rapid transit route its average weight time should always be shorter than the time it would take you to walk to the rapid transit so if you have a bus that's 400 m from a subway line the frequency should be at least every 10 minutes and 800 M away it should be every 20 at minimum all this might sound like a small detail but to make our cities better and fight climate change we need to get these small details right every bus driving around burning diesel on a route that's not very useful could be moving people and getting them out of cars thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 51,712

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, bus, transit design

Id: fJSXsFCgwx8

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2024